What are Individual Service Funds?

This page explains what Individual Service Funds are, and how you can work with Affinity Trust to understand and make decisions about your support.

What the Care Act says

The Care Act is the law in England about people who need support. It tells your local council how they should help people. The Care Act says you can have an assessment to find out if you need support.

Care Act assessment

A social worker from your local council will complete a Care Act assessment to find out what things you need support with. If you meet the criteria, you will be able to have a Personal Budget to pay for your support.

Your Personal Budget

Your Personal Budget is the amount of money the council will give you to spend on your support. One of the ways you can use your Personal Budget is called an Individual Service Fund.

Working with Affinity Trust

Our staff can help you think about how you want to use your Individual Service Fund, what is important to you and how you want to be supported. They can help you find out about ways to get support, and things to do in your area.

You can use your Individual Service Fund to pay for your support from Affinity Trust, other things you want to do in the community, and assistive technology that helps you to be independent.

Being in control

We will help you to put a plan together. This will include deciding about the way you would like your support to be managed. You will decide what goes into the plan and it will belong to you. You can make changes to your plan when you want to.

Getting the money

Your plan needs to say how much everything will cost. It must be agreed by your social worker. When this happens, the money to pay for your support will be ready for you to use.

Your home

If your plan includes changing where you live, or planning to move into your own home for the first time, we can help you find out about your choices

Reviewing your plan
We can help you to plan a review meeting to check how things are working with your plan and talk about any changes you want to make. You don’t have to wait until your review if you want to change something.

Changing your plan

If you don’t want to carry on with your plan or if you want to change the way your support is arranged, you can talk to your support manager.

Checking how things are going

We will ask you to say how things are going so that we can check that we are doing a good job and see if anything needs to change.

Choice and control

Affinity Trust will work with you to make sure that you understand your choices, and that you stay in control of your support.

What to do next

You can contact us to find out about how we can offer support in your local area.